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Posted on July 7th 2021
HGA Is Model of Good Practice, Says Department for Education
Harris Garrard Academy has been held up as a model of good practice by the Department for Education (DfE) for the way we have adapted our curriculum to help students recover after disruption due to Covid.
The way we have adapted our PE curriculum has been included in curriculum guidance sent to all secondary schools in England and Wales. The guidance highlights good practice evident in many schools, including ours.
Click HERE to read the DfE publication Teaching a Broad and Balanced Curriculum for Education Recovery.
Read the HGA case study that appears in the DfE guidance
Fran Day, Associate Assistant Principal at Harris Garrard Academy, discusses how HGA has adapted their PE curriculum.
In the PE department, we wanted to do everything we could to support pupils to be physically active when they all returned to the school site.
To achieve this, we adapted our curriculum by focusing on sports such as handball, netball, badminton, lacrosse and frisbee. These were activities that pupils had already encountered during their previous PE lessons, so they had acquired the important building blocks of movement, and the knowledge of participation they needed to engage actively with each one.
Teachers could quickly ascertain what pupils had remembered and then modify their instruction so that pupils could develop more complex knowledge. During these small-sided practices, pupils engaged more actively and the teacher was able to provide more bespoke feedback to improve each pupil’s participation.
From assessing pupils’ knowledge, a significant gap was evident in their understanding of how to develop fitness. As a result, we decided to focus on this wherever possible, making sure we selected activities to teach pupils how fitness for each activity could be developed.
All PE staff could share their expertise of fitness components and methods to train to improve fitness for participation, so that pupils received an accurate and consistent instruction.
Modifying what we teach has enabled us to maintain the rich breadth of sports and physical activities within our PE curriculum that we know is important to increase pupils’ motor competence, knowledge of rules, strategies and tactics, and healthy participation.
